1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system, and in particular to an improved method and apparatus for accessing data. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for accessing data stored in a legacy data format.
2. Description of Related Art
The manipulation of data in a data processing system is well known in the prior art. Data may be manipulated in many ways in a modern state-of-the-art data processing system including: data accessing, data encoding, data communications, data compression, data conversion, data entry, data exchange, data filing, data linking, data locking, data manipulation, data mapping, data modeling, data processing, data recording, data sorting, and data transferring. The large amounts of data that are available to the user of modern state-of-the-art data processing system often become overwhelming in magnitude and complexity. The amount of data available to a user has increased with the Internet. The Internet, also referred to as an "internetwork", in communications is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from the sending network to the protocols used by the receiving network (with packets if necessary). When capitalized, the term "Internet" refers to the collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols.
The Internet has become a cultural fixture as a source of both information and entertainment. Many businesses are creating Internet sites as an integral part of their marketing efforts, informing consumers of the products or services offered by the business or providing other information seeking to engender brand loyalty. Many federal, state, and local government agencies are also employing Internet sites for informational purposes, particularly agencies which must interact with virtually all segments of society such as the Internal Revenue Service and secretaries of state. Operating costs may be reduced by providing informational guides and/or searchable databases of public records online.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, also called simply "the web". Other Internet resources exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the web. In the web environment, servers and clients effect data transaction using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), in known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.). Information is formatted for presentation to a user by a standard page description language, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to basic presentation formatting, HTML allows developers to specify "links" to other web resources identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL is a special syntax identifier defining a communications path to specific information. Each logical block of information accessible to a client, called a "page" or a "web page", is identified by a URL. The URL provides a universal, consistent method for finding and accessing this information by the web "browser". A browser is a program capable of submitting a request for information identified by a URL at the client machine. Retrieval of information on the web is generally accomplished with an HTML-compatible browser, such as, for example, Netscape Communicator, which is available from Netscape Communications Corporation.
When a user desires to retrieve a document, such as a web page, a request is submitted to a server connected to a client computer at which the user is located and may be handled by a series of servers to effect retrieval of the requested information. The selection of a document is typically performed by the user selecting a hypertext link. The hypertext link is typically displayed by the browser on a client as a highlighted word or phrase within the document being viewed with the browser. The browser then issues a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) request for the requested documents to the server identified by the requested document's URL. The server then returns the requested document to the client browser using the HTTP. The information in the document is provided to the client formatted according to HTML. Typically, browsers on personal computers (PCs) along with workstations are typically used to access the Internet. The standard HTML syntax of Web pages and the standard communication protocol (HTTP) supported by the World Wide Web guarantee that any browser can communicate with any web server.
Often applications or programs may be sent to a computer from a web server across the Internet. Java applications are becoming increasingly more prevalent as the type of application sent between web servers and client computers. The Java programming language and Java applets provides platform--independent application programs over the Internet and the World Wide Web. Programs written in the Java language can be executed on any computer platform having a Java interpreter. In addition, the integrity of programs written in Java may be verified prior to their execution. Java applications are common on the Internet and becoming more increasingly common in intranets and in other types of networks used in businesses.
With the increasing use of Java applications, an incompatibility between these applications and data formatted for other types of operating environments has arisen. Data formatted for other environments are often not accessible by because Java classes necessary to read the data in these formats are absent. A need exists to access data stored in legacy data formats, which is data stored in a format not normally supported by a newer operating environment. For example in Java, data stored a format not supported by Java is considered a legacy data format. Legacy data is data stored in a format, which was convenient for use by an older data processing program (a "legacy application"), but which does not have widespread acceptance as a standard format. Thus, the data requires conversion in order to be used by applications other than the original "legacy application". Access to data in a legacy format is desirable to make data more easily available. For example, the data may be accessed by a Java applet in a web browser. Typically, a user will know the basic structure of the data, but does not having available job classes that are capable of reading the data. In addition, the user may not have the time or expertise to write the necessary Java reader tools from scratch.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus for accessing data in a legacy data format.